1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates generally to improvements in the field of software testing, and in particular to testers for use with software systems.
2. Description of the Prior Art
Manually constructed passive testers are known in the art. They typically test for the reachability of predetermined failure states. To our knowledge, no method has been previously described or used for passive testers of liveness properties, i.e., temporal properties that capture specific patterns of traversal of system states in the system under test. Similarly, conformance testing is also known in the art and documented in the literature. In a conformance test, one tests a model against an implementation, for conformance. A representative reference describing the prior art is Lee et al., "Passive Testing and its Applications to Network Management," Proc. ICNP '97 (IEEE Int. Conference on Network Protocols), October 1997. There is no known testing method in which one tests for specific logical "properties."